Nope. After seeing the top 4 questions each on their own I
had my suspicions already. Or maybe the sleep I have been
deprived of lately chasing worms (gaobot/phatbot and friends)
has made me cranky. I dunno.

There have been a lot of other posts on this forum that I
have read over the last few years that looked like the
musings of hackers/crackers/phreaks and spammers to
me that I have not felt obliged to even acknowledge.

It should be noted that as of 05-11-2004 2148 PDT, freak's last login was over two days ago, 05-09-2004 1708 PDT. Then at 05-09-2004 1709 PDT, one minute later, a new user was created, chiburashka, who almost immediately began asking questions that could be construed as being related to the same project that freak was working on before his disappearance.

There has been speculation (not just by me) that freak ditched his username when it was made clear enough to him that people were on to his scheme, and immediately created a new user to disguise himself.

This is only speculation, but the conincidence seems too strong, and the questions too closely related for it to just be dumb luck. That being the case, it seems prudent to, while giving the benefit of the doubt to chiburashka, exercise good and careful judgement when answering questions for this new user that may be applied toward improper uses.

After your posts, I have a question: is there a Monk or is there a possibility to stop or delete a thread? (reaped?) IMHO, I think it's better (in this community) don't continue discussions like these after your considerations. It's Perl, but...
UPDATE:
Ok, the node is under consideration...

On top of which, there are many places in the world where what we think of as basic freedoms can be practiced only in the absence of official scrutiny. I'm not saying that's the case here, but one should not be too quick to judge the underlying motivations from external signs. I'm all in favor of morality and ethics, but such attitudes have to come from the inside. Imposing them from the outside just drives people toward Victorian-style hypocrisy.

Seriously, those questions really seem to boil down to "how can I artificially inflate the hit count on a web site without being caught?". The poster never gave a satisfying explanation to why they wanted to do this. Or any explanation at all. I /msg'ed feak privately and got no answer. I imagine other monks have done the same, and suspect that if they had received an answer they would have said so.

So the signs are really, _really_, pointing to an annoying individual engaged in at least non-ethical, and possibly illegal, activities. I would love for freak to explain why they need this though.

I fail to see what that has to do with someone asking questions (well, the same underlying question eight times more or less) about inflating web hit counts. And posting questions in a public forum isn't exactly being circumspect.

While I'm not disagreeing with your conclusions, I came to a completely different one.

All of the questions linked above have more than one thing in common (the first being the subject matter). What is more of a nuisance in my mind is that the questions are all very short. Concise questions are fine, but these are also very repetitive questions, and aren't showing much in the way of motivation. I'm surprised how few responses there are of "do your own work".

I'm not really inclined to reply to these threads, but if I were so inclined I think there would be a lot of RTFM involved.

So short questions might be generated from a severe lack of what question to ask, or to let those of us who think we know what the unasked question might be to give an answer we think fits, without letting out too much info about what the original motivation is.

This can be used for good at, say, an industry convention to find out what the other guys are working on (or just to be socially engaging)

What works well to start a real-life conversation does not necessarily make for good practice on an asynchronous forum like PerlMonks. Short, rapid, back-and-forth questions are fine when responses come in seconds, but On The Internet (tm), responses can take minutes, hours, or days. It's unrealistic to expect the same sorts of social conventions to work equally well.

I'd have to agree. I glanced at only a few of those and saw a potentially disturbing pattern. While on the one hand, it could be a perfectly innocent quest for knowledge, the paranoid side of me just has to wonder. It's not that I'm paranoid, but they're just out to get me ;-)